davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Don’t be fooled by the dusky seduction of its wedding night prologue: “On the Rocks” is far and away the least cool thing that Sofia Coppola has ever made. That’s not a criticism so much as a contextualization. If the perfume ad prelude cocoons you inside the same gauzy softness that made “Lost in Translation” so entrancing, “Marie Antoinette” so tactile, and “Somewhere” so tenderly siloed within itself, it only does so in order to cut a sharp contrast into the domesticity that follows. That’s when this fizzy champagne cocktail of a film jumps a few years forward, landing in the kind of marriage where the waters have become just a bit too calm for the people swimming in them to feel safe.
Laura (Rashida Jones) is a successful Manhattan author who’s hovering around 40 and struggling to reconcile her identity as an artist (Boundless! Unpredictable! Sexy!) with her new-ish role as a mother of two (anchored… chaotic… sexless). She starts casting some panicked looks to the shore after her husband Dean comes home from one of his constant business trips all clouded on Xanax and seems to confuse her for someone else as they kiss. The next morning, she finds another woman’s perfume in his toiletries. Hmm.
It’s probably nothing, but this is one of those marriages where there’s just enough distance between two people for a little imagination to wedge its way into the gap. The only thing that stops Laura from having a full-on freak out is that she doesn’t seem to realize she’s in a Sofia Coppola movie, or that she’s a clear stand-in for a filmmaker whose body of work often sees marriage as the purgatorial first step in someone’s path towards her own self-understanding. It’s a Bressonian prison for a woman escaped (not for nothing, but the happiest marriage in Coppola’s first six films is between Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI).
In fairness to Laura, she doesn’t quite fit the profile of a typical Coppola heroine, and her life doesn’t totally resemble the stuff of a typical Coppola movie. For one thing, there are Black people in it. As Laura, Jones — whose implosive poise and casual ability to throw on a Radarte sweatshirt like it’s from the Gap make her a natural proxy for her director — while Dean is brought to life by a subdued Marlon Wayans, excellent in an aloof but full-bodied performance that reaffirms Coppola’s understated genius for outside-the-box casting. (James Woods is almost as good in “The Virgin Suicides” as he is bad in real life.) Race itself is only an ambient concept in the film, visible but not seen until an old white man weaponizes his privilege to get out of a speeding ticket in a moment that reads more critical than carefree.
For another thing, Laura’s world is uncharacteristically recognizable, even for all of its super-characteristic wealth. She lives in a pre-COVID New York that already seems nostalgic for itself, and on a street that locals will know by sight. There’s a Bernie sticker on her door, and a Greenlight Bookstore tote bag hanging nearby. Her daughters are her best friends, her life is sound-tracked by jazz standards and breezy new Phoenix instrumentals (as opposed to incandescent My Bloody Valentine bangers and a mash of post-punk gems). It’s possible that Laura doesn’t even know Jason Schwartzman. At one point, A24 is even name-checked as a punchline to a sly joke about how out of the loop she’s become.
Laura isn’t thrust into an alien environment that somehow reveals the entropy of her own existence; she isn’t dropped off at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, dowered to the Palace of Versailles, or dragged into the pole dancing room below Paris Hilton’s mansion (even if most viewers will look at the floor-to-ceiling windows of Laura’s massive SoHo apartment with a similar awe and foreignness). The dislocation is coming from inside the house, and the only aspect of Laura’s home that she doesn’t recognize is herself. It isn’t until Bill Murray rolls up in the back seat of a private car — lowering the window with the bleary-eyed suaveness of someone who just came from shooting a whiskey commercial in Japan — that the Coppola of it all really clicks into place.